by Robert Coram
Eventually, high-ranking Air Force officers and the father of one of Day’s law-school friends who was a U.S. senator from South Dakota interceded for Day with German officials. The logjam broken, in June 1959, the new family of Captain George “Bud” Day, Doris Day, and Steve Day left England. For Day there would be two months of training at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama, and then, in September, he would report for duty at Saint Louis University as an assistant professor of air science in the ROTC program.
Day, as would any fighter pilot, considered the assignment not only an undesirable one but one that would take away any chance of promotion. ROTC jobs usually were held by nonrated staff weenies — an officer’s last assignment before retirement. Plus, this was what was known as a “hard assignment,” which meant he could not be transferred early. For the next four years he would be out of the cockpit and out of the operational Air Force, lost in the Missouri backwaters.
Whatever God was saving him for would not be found in St. Louis.
6
Building Time
DAY had learned from his father to accept whatever came his way, not to complain, and to always do the best possible job. So he decided to make the most of the St. Louis assignment. “Maybe what God has in mind for me is raising this little Kraut, raising a great family,” he told Doris. “I still have a lot of hunting and fishing to do. I still have a lot of flying to do.”
Anyone who knew Air Force culture of that time would have had considerable doubt.
In 1959, the U.S. Air Force turned twelve years old and was going through enormous changes. Ten tactical fighter wings had been deactivated in the years after Korea. These cutbacks meant there were far more fighter pilots than there were available flying slots. SAC dominated the Air Force, and SAC believed bombers were the only aircraft that mattered. Fighter pilots said the tactical side of the Air Force had been “SAC-umcised.”
That an officer with Day’s education and performance could be sidetracked into an ROTC assignment is proof of this. But at St. Louis, Day was to turn conventional wisdom on its head. In a purely bureaucratic sense, his accomplishments there were nothing short of phenomenal. And those accomplishments were possible not because Day knew how to operate inside a bureaucracy but because he did what Midwesterners do: he worked hard.
Saint Louis University, while not well known, is a sound school, a Jesuit school that is very demanding of its students. Day considered it comparable to one of the military academies, in that competition among students is fierce and demands of professors are high.
Day was one of the most educated pilots in the Air Force. But he could never forget what he learned as a caddy: educated people drive bigger cars, wear nicer clothes, and have leisure time to play golf. Their conversations usually are loftier, their manners are better, and they just know things. As a result, upon his arrival, he began taking night classes for a master’s degree in international law.
When Day is asked about the people who most influenced his life, he quickly responds with the names of two academics: Marshall McKusick, dean of the law school at the University of South Dakota, and Kurt von Schuschnigg at the University of Saint Louis. Von Schuschnigg was a man of considerable reputation. He was a former chancellor of Austria who, in World War II, had been imprisoned by Hitler. He had been a judge on the World Court and had written a definitive text on international law.
Von Schuschnigg’s influence on the young pilot could be seen clearly in Day’s choice of topic for his master’s thesis.
On May 1, 1960, Francis Gary Powers, a contract pilot for the CIA, was shot down while flying a clandestine spy mission over the Soviet Union. The shoot-down led to one of the more serious international incidents of the Eisenhower administration. The prevailing opinion among legal experts was that since America and the Soviet Union were not at war, the spy flight clearly violated international law.
Von Schuschnigg disagreed with that line of thought and so did Bud Day. When a prominent academician wrote an article titled “The Illegality of the U-2 Flight,” Day decided to rebut it with a thesis titled “The Legality of the U-2 Flight.”
Day’s choice of topic shows not only von Schuschnigg’s influence but Day’s contrarian nature. (He would eventually publish an abstract of his thesis in the same journal in which the academician had published his anti–U-2 article.) But more important, Day’s thesis made him an expert on a matter in the mainstream of military and government thinking. And it sharpened his passion for politics.
The first 16 pages of the 102-page document are an exegesis of the nature of Communism. These pages lay the groundwork for Day’s position that America and the Soviet Union were not at peace but rather that “an undeclared war” existed between the two countries. Day claimed that “the long history of evil deeds by the Soviet Union clearly entitled the United States to justify the flights as a reprisal.” He noted that numerous acts of the Soviet Union “clearly amounted to aggression” and that the United States, in sending an unarmed U-2 aircraft on a spy mission, “actually exercised great restraint.” The U-2 flights over the Soviet Union were an effort to get vital information, “to prepare our defenses against the calamity of a nuclear surprise attack.” Those who said the flights violated international law could do so only by ignoring international realities. Punches were being thrown; it no longer mattered if the bell announcing the start of the round had not been rung.
Day’s reasons for choosing the topic aside, the document is important because it reveals much about his deep antipathy toward the Communist model of government. A few years later, he would fight desperately to keep the thesis a secret.
Another reason Day’s tour in St. Louis is important is that he turned a nonflying dead-end job into one of the best flying billets in the Air Force. And he did it while teaching a full load of courses and studying as a graduate student.
In St. Louis, Day chose not to live near the university but instead some twenty-five miles away in O’Fallon, Illinois, only a mile or so from Scott AFB. Not long after arriving, he went to the base to locate the commissary and check out the base hospital.
A clerk saw his wings and asked, “Are you a jet pilot?”
“Yes.”
“Do you fly the T-33?”
“Yes.”
“Are you current?”
“Yes.”
In fact, because Day had been the stan-eval officer at a combat-ready fighter wing in England, he was a high-time and highly qualified pilot — better qualified than the instructor pilots (IPs) at Scott. The clerk’s face lit up. He summoned an officer, who asked Day for a favor. The base was converting to jets and setting up a conversion school. The school was primarily to train the old Military Air Transport Service (MATS) pilots, and it offered these old heads the chance to convert to jet fighters. Could he pick up a new airplane and ferry it back to Scott?
Day’s boss in St. Louis said his job did not require his presence forty hours every week; Day could have Fridays off to fly.
He went home humming “Misty.”
Day flew 209 hours the first three months he was at St. Louis. To put this in perspective, a pilot assigned to a fighter squadron at the time flew about fifteen hours a month. Ground duties and training took up the remainder of his time.
In addition to teaching ROTC students; flying on Fridays, weekends, and some nights during the week; and taking graduate courses, Bud started a new business with Doris. Day had read a book that explained how to turn $1,000 into a fortune by investing in real estate. Day knew better than most that flying jet aircraft was a dangerous business. He and Doris were looking to adopt another child, maybe several more. And while he believed that God was saving him for a special job, he also was a Midwesterner suffused with common sense. And if something happened, he did not want his wife and children dependent on his pension or government insurance. Bud and Doris set up the Armed Forces Land Corporation, intending to buy old run-down houses, fix them up, sell them, and reinvest in more real estate. The
ir first purchase was Day’s old home place back in Riverside: 2222 Riverside Boulevard. Day paid the state $1,500 for the house, then fixed it up and rented it. He then bought a seven-unit apartment building, followed by an old house that he divided into four apartments. All of the real estate investments were back in Sioux City. The plan was to retire there, manage his by then extensive real estate portfolio, and take the state bar exam.
But he was not the only one with plans. In St. Louis, Doris had begun having intimations that someday something might happen to Bud. Determined that she must be able to support herself and the children, Doris learned to be a milliner and soon was turning out not only hats but something called a “whimsy” — a veil to cover the hair. Pink was her favorite color, so everything was pink. Her business was so successful that she began buying material in bulk and storing it in the garage. Soon her income matched Bud’s salary.
In St. Louis, Bud and Doris adopted their second child. Steven now was seven years old, a handsome blond who was never anything but ideal, a “good boy” in every way: smart, obedient, and loving toward his parents.
As they did with every major decision, Bud and Doris prayed long and hard before filing the adoption papers. Secretly, both wanted a girl. If the state of Illinois sent them a boy, they decided, that would be a sign from God that they should later adopt still another child. If Illinois sent them a girl, then they would know their family was complete. Their desire for a girl was not evident in the adoption papers. As before, they listed no particulars about sex or race. They knew they would find the baby they were meant to have.
In early 1963, Bud and Doris learned that a friend was having an out-of-wedlock baby, what at the time was called a “gray baby,” and the mother wanted to put the child up for adoption as soon as it was born. On February 27, 1963, Doris received a call saying a baby boy had been born. Doris did not want to meet the mother. Plus she was deeply fearful that the mother might change her mind at the last minute. She asked Bud to fly to California to pick up the baby.
While Doris anxiously rearranged diapers and bottles and baby clothes and the dozens of other necessities for a new baby, Day left for Los Angeles. The mother carried the baby to the door of the hospital and handed the child over to him. She also gave him a bag of diapers and bottles. Day cradled the baby, juggled the bag of supplies, walked back to the rental car, and returned to the airport. Years later Doris would say, “Bud didn’t even count the fingers and toes.”
“When you get a baby like this, you take what you get,” Day said.
The trip across country must have been challenging. From Los Angeles to St. Louis was about three hours in the new Boeing 707. Add in the drive to the Los Angeles International Airport and the time spent waiting for the flight, and Day had the infant for some six hours before he arrived in St. Louis. He had never before cared for a baby. All he could do was occasionally stick a bottle into the child’s mouth. When he did, the baby cried in apparent discomfort. Day noticed a flight attendant watching him and said, “I don’t know much about this.”
“I can tell,” she said and leaned over to help.
She showed Day how to burp the baby, which stopped his crying for a while.
Day fed the infant, looked at him, and thought about a name. He also decided to begin a family record, to buy a camera and begin taking movies of the two boys.
Beth and Charlie Hubbs, the Days’ best friends, met Day at the airport and bought him home, where Doris was waiting.
When Doris opened the door, Day held up the boy and said, “Doris, meet our new son.”
She reached out with a big smile and asked, “What is our son’s name?”
“Meet George Everette Day Jr.”
Day’s birthday was February 24 and the new baby had been born on February 27. The birthdays were so close that Day figured the new boy was meant to be a junior.
Doris looked at Bud and said, “God doesn’t figure our family is complete.”
“Doris, let’s not adopt a girl until this one is potty trained.”
DAY’S job title was assistant professor of air science, prosaic in the extreme, and his first ER notes that “his involuntary assignment to this duty was not in accord with his career objectives” but that he “consistently exerted a maximum effort with enthusiasm.” As usual, if he saw something he considered wrong, it was his nature to correct it. He was on campus only a few weeks when he saw someone walking across the university grounds in an Air Force uniform bearing the insignia of both an officer and an enlisted man. Day stopped the man and questioned him. The man apparently resented the questions, and moments later the two were duking it out. Day knocked the man to the ground as several ROTC students rushed to help. They held the man down while a university employee called the FBI. It turned out that the man was an ex-convict who planned to ransack the dormitories. Day received a commendation from the university.
All of the Scott AFB pilots whom Day checked out in jets were of higher rank than he. But his ER notes that “Captain Day is always in complete charge” and able to supervise without friction, a rare gift considering the egos of fighter pilots.
Reading between the lines of the ERs, one could see a foreshadowing of the combat leader Day would become. He was all business. Very demanding. Very professional. But he never forgot his manners. When he crawled out of the cockpit after checking out a pilot, he said, “I enjoyed flying with you.” He complimented his subordinates. He was a soft-spoken and kind man, with elaborate, almost Victorian manners.
Day’s second ER covers the period from April 1, 1960, to March 31, 1961, and falls into the water-walker category. He rewrote and streamlined ROTC operating procedures. He changed the way ROTC students were selected and made ROTC participation a highly competitive and highly desired program among students. The reviewing officer said Day was the best judge of men he had ever known and was the best jet instructor at Scott. The endorsing officer noted that Day was so popular among students that they adjusted their schedules to take his classes. And though he was the most recent ROTC officer to arrive on campus, he was selected over all others to be commandant of cadets. An additional review from the major general who commanded all Air Force ROTC units said Day was among the top five officers assigned to the twenty-six colleges and universities in the entire ROTC program.
The ER covering the period from April 1, 1961, to March 31, 1962, was even better. Day’s reviewing officer said that his performance exceeded the previous year’s; that he had established a way to control drill attendance “that had completely eluded his predecessors”; and that he forced a decision-making process on cadet leaders that “so enhanced their prestige and self-confidence that it has been observed and favorably commented on by the dean of the college.” The ER said Day’s ability to identify and nurture leadership among students was “outstanding.” Esprit de corps in the cadets was higher than it had ever been. ROTC applications increased from 22 percent to 50 percent.
The next five-month rating period ended August 31, 1962, and said that Day had lowered the absent-from-drill rate to 4 percent — less than the university’s sickness rate. One of the key measuring points of an ROTC program is how many sophomores apply to take advanced ROTC, a step that almost certainly signifies that upon graduation they plan to go on active duty. Applications for advanced ROTC went from 125 the previous year to 430. The endorsing officer said that because of Day the entire campus looked upon Air Force ROTC students as a “prestige outfit.” It is little wonder that while at St. Louis, Day was promoted to major “below the zone” — that is, ahead of his contemporaries.
But it kept getting better. The ER covering the period between September 1, 1962, and July 26, 1963, included a checked block that said Day was “outstanding, almost never equaled,” a ranking that requires justification and several endorsements from senior officers. The ER said that under Major Day, the ROTC program at Saint Louis University had shown a marked increase in the production of highly qualified pilot-oriented Air
Force officers. Of twenty-three ROTC graduates, fifteen went into pilot training. The Reverend Martin Hastings, dean of the College of American Studies at the university, declared Day as a “superior example of an Air Force officer.” Another endorsement noted that Day had received his master’s degree in international law and was among the “most highly qualified, dedicated, and distinguished officers I have known.” The commandant of all Air Force ROTC programs said Day was in the “top five of forty-seven majors in his area.”
It is little wonder that when Day left St. Louis, he was assigned to the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. This is a school an officer must attend before he is considered for promotion to higher levels of command. On January 17, 1964, Day graduated and was judged “outstanding” in every category. Among those who had made a big impression on him while he was in Norfolk was one of the guest lecturers, Navy Admiral John S. McCain.
AS a graduate of the Staff College, a major promoted below the zone, and a man with astonishing efficiency reports, Day applied for and thought he would get an assignment in the tactical Air Force. He wanted back in the cockpit. If this thing going on in Vietnam turned into a full-scale war, he hoped to be there, but for that to happen he needed to be in a tactical unit.
Three jobs were available. The first was advising the 107th Tactical Fighter Group, an Air National Guard unit in Niagara Falls, New York, that flew F-100s. Most Air Force officers considered such assignments right down there with ROTC assignments. Day made a few phone calls and found that the 107th was so short of pilots that it could not achieve a “combat-ready” rating, and the Air Force was considering disbanding it.
The second possibility was a staff job in the Pentagon. But going to the Pentagon meant he would become a staff weenie, so he summarily turned that job down. There was a spot as an exchange officer, flying an F-8 Crusader with the Marine Corps. Day wanted to fly with his beloved Marines, but he did not want the six-month tour at sea that was part of the assignment.